Diana Dueyn - The Big Meow

“Well, he has another name in our time,” Rhiow said. “And I have a feeling we may need to introduce you. But that’ll wait for the moment. The Serpent’s enemy– That’s one of our bigger cousins, surely.”

“A jaguar,” Helen said, looking more closely at the rubbing. “Normally there would be spots in the drawing, but there aren’t, which can mean a couple of things.” She sounded uneasy. “But the headdress makes the identification easier. It’s a god called Tepeyollotl.”

Suddenly everyone was exchanging glances. “There’s a name we’ve heard recently…” Rhiow said.

“From the Lady in Black?” Helen said. “Yes. I remember the epithets she was attaching to the name. The Devourer of Worlds…” She shook her head. “But they’re not the usual descriptions attached to the Black Leopard. Originally Tepeyollotl was the personification of the Dark at the Heart of the Mountains. He ruled caves and deep places, and the Mayan eighth hour of night, when they felt that darkness had completely fallen.” Helen paused, swallowed. “But most importantly, he was the lord of echoes and earthquakes.”

That last word brought everyone’s heads up. “Earthquakes…” Aufwi said.

“Yes,” Rhiow said, her fur rising again at the memory of that awful moment in the tree. “There do seem to be a lot of those going around, don’t there…”

“What’s the problem with the lack of spots?” Urruah said.

“It suggests that this image wasn’t of the everyday version of Tepeyollotl,” Helen said. “Earthquakes have their place in the natural order, and the ancient peoples knew that. But they also understood that it wasn’t past the abilities of the Lone Power to cause them when It had reason. The dark pelt would mean that this is also an avatar of Tezcatlipoca, of the Mesoamerican version of the Lone Power: the Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” She rubbed her face. “But he has other names that were supposed to belong to a power even above him: an older one. Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque, the One who wants to own Heaven and Earth: and Chalchihuihtotolin, the Master of the Sorceries from Outside.”

“Meaning outside our universe,” said Rhiow, feeling as distressed as the Whisperer had earlier sounded.

Once again here was the issue that Hwaith had originally brought to them – slightly better defined, but with no sense of where they were supposed to look for a solution. For a wizard on the One’s and the Powers’ business, there was a tendency to consider Them the rulers or managers of pretty much everything in the known universe-bundle, and the Lone Power the main source of trouble. But it was rare for one’s business to require a wizard to deal with issues that reached outside the Powers’ sheaf of universes, or were sourced outside them.

“Arhu,” Helen said, “were there any more pages in that folder?”

“That’s all I saw,” he said.

“All right,” Rhiow said. “Let the Eye go for now…”

The room came back.

“So first we have the poor soulsplit Lady in Black,” said Urruah after a moment, “with her talk of her friend the Devourer shredding up whole universes, ours very much included. And now a concrete connection between her and the group that’s meeting and doing Iau knows what at Dagenham’s… but something that’s helping her nasty universe-devouring friend: very likely at the very least a string of serial killings. Those are bad enough, but what they’re up to is going to destroy their entire world. Are these vhai’d ehhif completely out of their minds??”

It was almost a yowl. Everyone froze in place for a second, and Rhiow threw a glance at the Silent Man’s bedroom door, half expecting him to emerge and demand to know what the problem was. But nothing happened.

“Sorry,” Urruah said then, and tucked himself down against the floor. His tail was still twice its normal thickness. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I am finding this… disturbing.”

Helen sat back on the sofa and started unbraiding the hair she’s braided earlier. “You wouldn’t be alone,” she said. “But let’s take this piece by piece. Somebody in that house – probably Dagenham – has been studying these images hard enough to want to keep copies where he can get at them easily.”

“That’s causing about half of my freak,” Urruah said. “The ehhif in these particular cultures were big on spilling blood, weren’t they? Lots of it.”

“Not at the beginning of their histories,” Helen said. “But they got that way.”

“That being the connection, you’re thinking, to the serial killings,” Aufwi said to Urruah.

“And at the same time,” said Hwaith, “somebody in that house… maybe Dagenham… has been dabbling in charms.”

Everyone was quiet for a few seconds, considering what this new complication might mean. “What’s bothering me,” Helen said, “is that information that we might need is missing from those pages.”

“The gaps…” Aufwi said.

“We need to see the tablets or whatever that those rubbings were taken from,” Helen said. “If there are just gaps in the originals, we need to know that. But there may be remnants of data that didn’t transfer properly.” She looked thoughtfully at Arhu. “We’re going to have to find out where the original carvings are.”

“Unfortunately there’s no way to tell that by just looking,” Urruah said. “One of the only weaknesses of using the Eye for research…”

Arhu bristled a little. “Calm down,” Urruah said. “I just mean that we’re going to have to go physically touch those documents to find out where they came from.”

“That’s a project for a little later,” Rhiow said. “Helen, you said the two peoples who did this writing were apart from each other in time – “

“The Mayans abandoned their cities in the ninth century,” Helen said. “The Aztecatl, the People from Aztlan as they called themselves, dominated the Mexican region later – the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries as modern Western ehhif culture reckons it. But they started a great migration from the south, so Azteca legends say, a hundred years after the Mayans vanished.”

“Strange, then, to find the two sets of characters together. We need to sit down and clarify what they mean, what relationship they have to one another – “

So abruptly that the noise made everyone in the room jump, a brassy she-ehhif’s voice burst out singing: “There’s no business… like show business… like no business I know – “

“Sorry, sorry!” Helen said as everyone, particularly Hwaith, stared at her. “That’s my room – “ She pulled her phone out of her bathrobe pocket, and the singing stopped. “Hello? Yes, good morning! No, not at all. – Well, this wouldn’t be the best moment. An hour from now would be better.” She glanced over at Rhiow: Rhiow waved her tail in assent. “…Yes, I needed to sleep in this morning a little, I don’t normally do such late nights! Not at parties, anyway.” That wicked smile popped out again, as if she was imagining the effect of the last line on whoever was on the other end of the phone. “…Really? That’s a lovely thought. Well, assuming they’re willing to back it up with some nice numbers in the contract. …Yes, that would be fine. …How about in the lobby? Perfect. In an hour, then. Thanks so much! Goodbye…”

Helen hung up. “I’m sorry,” Hwaith said, staring at the phone, “but that’s… unusual.”

“There are moments in our time when we wish it was unusual,” Rhiow said. “Enjoy the relative telephonic peace and quiet of your era while it lasts.”

“Paramount and MGM have been after Freddie already this morning,” Helen said. “I have two meetings before lunch… after which I’ll have some leisure to pump him, so very casually, for more information about Dagenham.”

“That sounds fine to me,” Rhiow said. “But the other thing that’s bothering me now is that Arhu found a charm working in that house this morning when we missed it last night. Assuming we did miss it.”

“I would have smelled anything like that a mile away,” Siffha’h said, and now it was her turn to bristle. “It’s something new.”

“Sif, please,” Rhiow said. “It’s just that its presence changes the context a little. An ehhif might stumble onto the mechanics of a charm by itself. But it also might have been given such a thing to use by a wizard.”

Everyone stared, particularly Aufwi. “What kind of wizard would–”

“An overshadowed one,” Arhu said with a growl.

Rhiow waved her tail in agreement. “We might be about to find ourselves dealing with something of the sort,” she said. “Which is why I want to make sure we’re careful about covering our own tracks when we go back there: leaving no traces of wizardry that we can’t avoid. And let’s take the idea a little further. That weird spot you found in the library…” She glanced at Hwaith and Urruah. “Cousins, could what we were seeing there not have been just some old remnant of a gate’s casual presence? Could it have been a portal that was purposely emplaced there by a wizard with minimal gate management experience, then later purposely removed again — and then someone attempted to cover up that it had ever been there at all?”

“Hence the weird way the residue looked,” Urruah said. His tail was lashing. “Could be. I wasn’t thinking that way at the time–” His tail lashed harder. “And you know what? I’m an idiot. I want another look at that right now –”

“Ruah –”

“Saash would have seen that right away –”

Rhiow reached up and cuffed him upside the nearest ear, though with the claws in. “Maybe she would, but she’s not here to ask. You are!” she said. “And I’m betting you’d have thought of that yourself pretty soon. So stop chastising yourself! And we’ll all go have a look… but not right this second.” She waited a few moments for Urruah to settle down again.

“So this list of dates,” Hwaith said. “If this is somebody’s appointment calendar we’re looking at – “

“I suspect it is,” Helen said, “though thinking about the kind of appointments that may be involved frankly gives me the creeps.” She pulled her phone out, put it on silent, and pocketed it again. “We need to decipher the dates and see what they point to. The Dark Lady seemed to be hinting at something that was supposed to happen soon, and my money says the dates on those pages are going to be germane.”

“’Ruah will work on it,” Rhiow said. “He’s best at working with ehhif symbology.”

“The Whisperer will be able to guide you in regards to how the Mayan and Azteca calendars were structured,” Helen said. “But just so you know: one way they organized dates was to group them in thirteen-day segments called trecena, and Tepeyollotl ruled one of those in particular. It was mazatl, the time of hunting one’s prey. If you see any references to that — ”

“Noted,” Urruah said. “I’ll see what I find.”

“You know a lot about this,” Siffha’h said.

Helen smiled. “I came late to my heritage,” she said, “but I made up for lost time when I got there. Meanwhile…” She stretched. “I’d better go get my meetings dealt with, and see what I can find out about Mr. Dagenham along the way. Where shall we meet later?”

“Back here makes most sense,” Rhiow said.

Off to one side a door opened, and a moment later Sheba and the Silent Man came through it. Sheba waved her tail in greeting at everyone and headed for the food dishes, but the Silent Man paused in the doorway, looking around at everybody a little oddly.